No Health Without Her

Why Women’s Health Demands Women in Power

- by Jeanette Kæseler Mortensen and Chelsea Ranger

In the Nordics, we pride ourselves on equality. We lead global gender rankings, fund generous welfare systems, and are often cited as the world’s most progressive societies. But dig a little deeper, and another story emerges: women's health is still underfunded, under-researched, and systematically sidelined in health policy and innovation.

The Leadership Gap is the Health Gap

The root cause? Women are still underrepresented where decisions are made: at the boardroom table, in innovation councils, and in the leadership of health institutions. Women comprise 60–90% of Norway's workforce in health, care, and academia, yet they remain vastly underrepresented in leadership roles: 13% of chairs, 21% of board members, 19% of CEOs, and 20% of founders. These numbers are directly on par with male-dominated industries.

While the government is attempting action towards this effect, new 2024 gender balance regulation rollouts in Norway do not apply to 76% of the life science sector. The 24% that is covered is already near the minimum threshold, meaning little to no change will occur.

If we want better health outcomes, economic performance, and equitable societies, the conclusion is clear: we cannot separate women’s health from women’s leadership. They are two sides of the same strategic coin.

The Data Desert: What Gets Measured Gets Funded

Despite decades of medical advancement, women’s bodies remain poorly understood. What exists today is best articulated as a holistic system of neglect. Women are systematically underserved across every domain: from what is researched, to how funding is allocated, how symptoms are diagnosed, how professionals are trained, and how policies are written and implemented.

Most clinical research still defaults to the male body as the standard. Symptoms of diseases like heart attack, ADHD, or autism often present differently in women, yet those differences are routinely missed. Reproductive and hormonal conditions like endometriosis, PMDD, or perimenopause are underdiagnosed and under-treated, with enormous costs to productivity, quality of life, and public budgets. In conditions that disproportionately impact women, such as autoimmune diseases and Alzheimer’s, funding still systematically ignores women.

Despite accounting for over 50% of the population, only 4% of global healthcare R&D is focused specifically on women’s health, and that number further reduces to 1% if you remove oncologic conditions. This underinvestment is not just inequitable, it’s irrational, given the scale of the impact on public health, productivity, and wellbeing. In 2023, female-founded companies in Europe received just 2.8% of venture capital. In 2020, only 5% of R&D went to women’s health; just 1% to non-cancer women-specific conditions.

Today, in the U.S., hundreds of terms, including ‘woman,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘fetus,’ are being stripped from federal grant language. These rollbacks are influencing global corporate policies, including in Europe. We cannot assume progress is permanent.

Policies reflect the priorities of those who design them. And when decision-makers are largely male, and health systems are optimized for male physiology and career paths, women’s needs become invisible by design.

This isn’t just a scientific blind spot, it’s the need for a complete redesign of leadership.

More Women in Leadership Equals Better Health for All

Research from McKinsey & Company, Harvard Business Review, and the Journal of Business Ethics consistently shows that female leaders are more likely to champion inclusive policies, prioritize long-term investments, and lead with sustainability in mind across all sectors, including health.

In health governance, this leadership approach results in greater investment in preventive care and reproductive health, along with deeper attention to social determinants. It also fosters systems that accommodate women’s lived realities, menopause, fertility, caregiving, not penalize them.

According to a 2025 report by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey, just nine conditions account for over one-third of the women’s health gap. Addressing these through targeted investments could add $1 trillion to the global economy by 2040 and reduce women’s unhealthy years by two-thirds.

Supporting this, an OECD study on governance found that gender-diverse boards are significantly more likely to enact policies that improve long-term population health rather than chase short-term savings. In short, more women in power means smarter health policy for everyone.

The urgency is underscored by new data from Denmark. A 2024 report by Kraka and Deloitte found that, when controlling for all other factors, the single strongest predictor of career success is gender. Women still face a 20% pay gap in early- and mid-career, and an astonishing 60% gap at senior levels.

As Alfred Jens Bjørlo says: “We can’t keep relying on women being the backbone of the health system, while at the same time denying them space at the top.” Leadership equity, then, isn’t just aspirational, it’s essential. For fairness. For performance. For public trust.

Foresight from the Future: Four Paths, One Choice

Recent strategic foresight research offers four plausible futures for the role of women in Nordic leadership by 2030. Women in Life Science Norway (WiLD Norway), together with our partners and the Danish futurist Jeanette Kæseler Mortensen, have developed four scenarios for female leadership in the Nordics toward 2030.

They are based on uncertain but decisive factors: geopolitical tensions, economic instability, developments in artificial intelligence, gender politics, sustainability, and labor market models. The scenarios are named after four scenario-based leadership archetypes, each representing different ways women may exercise (or be prevented from exercising) leadership in future societies.

These are not predictions. The scenarios are mental tools that allow us to test how robust our strategies truly are for increasing the number of women in leadership. They help us ask the crucial question: What if this happens, will our strategy hold up? If a strategy only works in one future scenario but collapses in the other three, it’s a clear sign it needs to be revised. Strategies that survive all four scenarios, even the most demanding, are not only future-resilient—they also promote female leadership because they account for complexity, life stages, and inclusive power distribution.

Here is a brief overview:

The Strategic Stabilizer The Nordics hold their ground in a fragmented world. Women are visible in crisis management and public administration, but remain excluded from the real power rooms of tech and finance. Diversity is managed by regulation, not by genuine change.
The Green Catalyst The green economy is thriving, but lacks a gender perspective. Women drive local innovation but are shut out of decision-making spaces. Economic stability provides security, but not access.
The System Shifter A values-driven future where women and men co-develop inclusive systems across sectors. Workplaces, technology, and politics are shaped with attention to life phases, health, and equal opportunity. New forms of leadership flourish here.
The Pretty Spokeswoman Women appear in reports, campaigns, and panels, but not in the rooms where decisions are made. Equality exists on paper, but systems remain unchanged. The result? Symbolic politics and burnout.

Only one of them, the System Shifter scenario, places women's health and inclusive leadership at the center of sustainable transformation. In that scenario, health systems are responsive to life-stage needs. Care work is recognized, not marginalized. And female leaders co-design the AI, health, and sustainability transitions, not as add-ons, but as architects.

Contrast that with the Disempowered Spokeswoman scenario, where women are present in ESG reports and on panels, but lack real power. Health remains reactive, gender policy is performative, and systems continue to reward uninterrupted, masculine-coded career paths.

Which path we choose is not fate, it’s design. And the design starts now. “Women’s health, women’s leadership and gender-aware innovation must be at the very core of how Norway meets the future. Not only because it’s right – but because it’s smart. And the smartest countries will be the ones that fix systems – not just symptoms.” As Alfred Jens Bjørlo poignantly puts it.

Rebuilding the Table

These future scenarios are not just about women. They are about what kind of leadership we elevate, and what kind of society we build, what future we’re creating for the next generations. Do we choose real change, or settle for facades and polished numbers? Do we break old patterns, or reinforce them under more inclusive headlines?

What we get depends on the choices we make now. And the responsibility does not lie only with female leaders. It rests equally with men, with executives, with politicians, with you and me. To achieve lasting equality, we must do more than count the women at the table.

We must change the table itself. We must reconsider what power is. Who has access to it. Whose lives the systems are built for.

True progress demands that we develop new leadership models—models that accommodate the whole human, the whole life. That means redefining masculinity, sharing caregiving responsibilities, and letting go of systems that reward constant presence over insight, relational intelligence, and long-term thinking. Women cannot thrive in systems that are blind to women’s health, life stages, and time constraints. And no one can carry this shift alone. It requires joint effort and political will.

The time for symbolic gestures is over. The time for systemic change is now. Not because it’s trendy, but because it is essential for transformation, trust, and future resilience. Future leadership is not just about women. It’s about building systems where everyone can succeed, and where differences don’t limit, but enrich.

A Nordic Imperative

The Nordics have the credibility, infrastructure, and social mandate to lead a new era of health governance, one that treats women's health not as a niche but as a cornerstone of resilience and prosperity. That means:

Leadership & Representation

Embedding life-stage equity into public health policy and innovation strategies.
Ensuring women make up at least 50% of leadership across health-related boards, tech, and investment bodies.
Sector-specific board targets (private + public)
Gender-balanced grant review panels

Funding & Innovation

Funding women's health R&D as aggressively as green tech.
Targeted funding for women’s health research and female-led startups
Sex-proportionate clinical study incentives

Measurement & Accountability

Measuring economic performance not just by GDP, but by wellbeing and healthspan.
Use WHIT platform to track underserved conditions

Because in a region committed to climate action, social trust, and democratic values, ignoring women’s health is not just unjust, it’s unstrategic. As Alfred Jens Bjørlo says; “Norway and the Nordics must lead globally – not follow. Let’s turn Nordic values into Nordic leadership – in women’s health, research and innovation."